The famous scene; is Harold depicted with an arrow in his eye? Or is he being cut down by a Norman horseman? Or is it a sequence and Harold is depicted twice? Credit: Unknown, suspected to be commissioned by Matilda of Flanders, Odo of Bayeux or Edith of Wessex, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
1066 was a momentous year in the history of England. The last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, famously travelled hundreds of miles to firstly rebuff the Norwegian Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, before marching back down south to meet that other invader, William, Duke of Normandy.
The second battle, misnamed for Hastings, saw the king killed, perhaps by an arrow through the eye, perhaps not, and gave rise to the moniker of William the Conqueror, the first Norman king of England.
Much of the tale is depicted in the magnificent Bayeux Tapestry, thought to have been woven just a few years after the battle. But there remain a number of key gaps in our knowledge about Harold Godwinson. One of the most surprising is that, until very recently, no-one was completely sure where he had actually lived. Now new research led by Newcastle University seems to have finally disclosed the whereabouts of Harold’s home; the coastal village of Bosham in West Sussex.
Here, ScienceVega talks to Dr Duncan Wright about Harold, the Bayeux Tapestry and (somewhat surprisingly) the indoor toilet that seems to have put beyond any doubt the whereabouts the home of the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.
ScienceVega: How can we be sure that the Bayeux Tapestry depicts Bosham?
DW: (Laughing) Well, we think that the name above the scene is the giveaway! Very rarely in archaeology do we get stuff labelled so clearly, which in this case is very nice.
But seriously, we also know that Harold’s residence is there because it was his father’s residence before him. We know that from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and we know he was granted the land by Edward the Confessor. It is worth saying that it wasn’t much land and Bosham was still primarily held by the monastery, the church, and that the Godwinsons only had a little enclave within it. The Chronicle not only mentions his father’s holding, but also the special relationship to the nearby port, and the port is really key to the whole significance of the site.
But going back to the name, the big question is whether Bosham appears in the tapestry twice. In the tapestry we see Harold going off to Normandy after being at the church and having a feast, then we think we see him coming back to Bosham in a really great scene where we see a tower, but the tapestry doesn’t always label places. We know Bosham is depicted once, but we think it’s probably depicted twice.
ScienceVega: How confident are you that you have found the site of Harold Godwinson’s House?
DW: With archaeology you are often dealing with a lot of ambiguities, but on this I am about as confident as I can be. We have a high-status residence, which is perpetuated by the later manorial site as well, and that is a good indicator. A thousand years is a long time and sometimes manor houses become deserted or the principal residence gets moved around and sometimes the manor is split between heirs and things get complicated. But with manor houses occasionally, as we have at Bosham, you can get a kind of perpetual occupation of a site. In this case, we have a nice latrine, which is significant, and which has been the focus of much press attention! It turns out that the toilet of a famous king is somehow the cherry on the top!
At the same time, from the administrative history of the site, it’s clear it’s the later manorial site. A piece of the jigsaw comes from where hundred courts met. A hundred was a sort of Anglo-Saxon territorial or administrative unit, a bit like a secular parish is today, and these courts that presided over the hundred did not always meet in obvious places – it might be an isolated feature in the landscape, for instance. In this case we know the hundred court met at the manor house at Bosham and continued to do so as late as 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. The fact that they assembled in the same place for a thousand years is remarkable.
Holy Trinity Church, Bosham, looking east. Credit: Newcastle University.
ScienceVega: How careful do you have to be in highlighting your research which is part of a private dwelling?
DW: The homeowners have been very generous and let us not just into their garden, but also allowed us to look around the house, going into the attic and every other room looking for medieval timbers, which we did find. The homeowners want to remain private and as a courtesy we haven’t displayed pictures of their home.
I don’t know what it is about Harold, but he seems to be a bit like the Knights Templar in that he attracts a certain type of interest. With this press release more than any other, I’ve received some strange emails!
ScienceVega: There was an excavation in 2006, and you say that you have reinterpreted that excavation. What has changed in the intervening 15 years?
DW: It’s on the basis of research that has only happened in the last ten years or so. Gabor Thomas at the University of Reading and John Blair at Oxford University have both written about the correlation of latrines that are integrated into early medieval buildings. We only really see the Anglo-Saxon ‘ensuites’ in very high-status residences.
We see latrines on other sites, although they would have probably still been separate, but from the 10th Century we see this very clear correlation of latrines that are integrated into elite houses, typically at one gable end where the bedchamber would also be. The excavation in 2006 found that in the context of this timber building.
But we are not talking about a technological innovation in the interim; it is simply that these two scholars said there was a real correlation, and we have used that interpretation with Bosham, which allowed us to identify this building as being high status.
Part of the garden ruin at Bosham, confirmed as a medieval building by recent research. Credit: Newcastle University.
ScienceVega: How common is the ‘ensuite’ in the 10th Century?
DW: We have plenty of places, but they’re not always royal locations per se. They’re often the homes of aristocrats or nobles who were the up-and-comers of the day. But it is certainly at the top end of society – it’s not everyone by any stretch. We are talking about the grander sites that tend to have these incorporated latrines.
What we also often see in these sites is that many of them are rebuilt on the same footings as older buildings, and we seem to have that at Bosham. It’s not entirely clear from the excavation, but timber buildings don’t last that long, perhaps just a lived person’s lifetime, but we appear to get some Norman pottery at the Bosham site, so there is a question as to whether the Anglo-Saxon precursor is built on the same footings before the whole complex is rebuilt in stone a bit later.
ScienceVega: What methods of investigation were used on the site?
DW: We looked at previous work on the site, but what we then did at Bosham and seven other sites across the country, was a range of geophysical surveys, such as radar surveys, especially of the grounds and garden of this house.
Another key component and one I think members of the public are perhaps less aware of, is buildings archaeology. People often think our understanding of buildings is based on site documents and plans, but when you are looking back a thousand years, it’s often the analysis of the standing remains. We can tell a lot from that.
Our colleague Dr Michael Shapland looked at the existing manor house itself and went through the sequence of the building there. He identified that not only is the manor house itself built around a 12th Century core, but also a second building medieval building is situated in the grounds, which is known as the garden ruin. Previously, it was thought of as some kind of romantic ruin, perhaps from the 18th or 19th centuries, but it looks to be 12th Century as well. We are not talking ‘tapestry early’, but they are potentially the first stone buildings of this high-status residence on the site; the successors to the timber buildings that were excavated.
It’s a real piecemeal exercise of standing building assessment, geophysical survey and the desk-based work that we do including looking at historic maps, documentary sources and then re-evaluating the previous work. It’s a real jigsaw puzzle.
The site of the Battle of Hastings is a few miles inland from the town of Hastings. The spot where Harold fell is said to be marked by the high altar of the now partially ruined Battle Abbey, which William the Conqueror had built after his victory. Credit: Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
ScienceVega: How long has this site have been of interest to archaeologists?
DW: Weirdly not as much as it should have been. On a local level, people have studied it and the association with the tapestry has obviously been made, and the precise location of the site had almost been pinpointed through hearsay. But in terms of concerted archaeological work, apart from the 2006 excavations, it hasn’t really been of interest to academics. It’s odd to think that is was hiding in plain sight on the tapestry.
What this does is it taps into how these sites are conceptualised. In our work we call places such as Bosham, ‘lordly centres’, and our project included early castles in this classification. What is significant is that the castles have been the focus of research, over other types of lordly centre, which have often been neglected. This is certainly the case at Bosham; we have no doubt that if this site had been turned into a castle it would have been studied to death. It would have been up there with Hastings Castle, or Lewes Castle, or any one of the celebrated Sussex castles. William the Conqueror had it as a royal holding, the only royal holding in Sussex he kept, but he doesn’t build a castle on it, and that’s unusual. We don’t know why he didn’t.
So that explains why Bosham has not really been looked at because these lordly centres, beyond castles, generally have not been a research focus and not people often don’t know how to characterise them. They are high status, they are important and it’s where the elites lived, but they’re not castles. Because they lie outside of that mainstream thinking, this site not been studied as it should have been.
ScienceVega: What research would you like to follow up with on this discovery?
DW: Our project is coming to an end so we are in the process of looking at the next stage, but one obvious thing at Bosham would be to do some dendrochronology on the standing building. We have medieval timbers existing in the house, which we think are structures from the 13th Century hall, a very distinctive ‘crown post’ timber, which has been reused in the stairwell of the current manor house.
We can actually see where the medieval timbers were fitted, and even though we think it’s from a 13th Century structure, those timbers might actually have been reused from an even earlier building. It’s even possible that they are originally Anglo-Saxon timbers that were reused and had a couple of afterlives, firstly in the medieval hall and then in the later manor house. Dendrochronology would tell us that and hopefully provide a calendar year that the tree was felled; it can sometimes even discern the season that it was cut down.
We could also do more with the garden ruin. We undertook close observation of the ruin across a couple of days, but we could do a ‘stone by stone’ survey. That would be a really detailed survey that would mean we could be more confident about our dating and our phasing of it as well. The more you look at these things, the more you’re able to unpick the history.
The Bayeux Tapestry, showing King Harold riding to Bosham, where he attends church and feasts in a hall, before departing for France. © The Society of Antiquaries of London.
ScienceVega: Going back to the Bayeux Tapestry, King Harold is often believed to be depicted with an arrow in his eye, but that’s no longer the perceived view.
DW: That’s what I meant by the ambiguity of it. There is a strong case for the arrow being added to the tapestry later. It’s also common in tapestries that the text is related to what has happened just before the image. So with Harold, it’s not entirely clear whether it’s depicting an arrow in the eye and then him being hacked down, and whether that’s almost a sequence, or whether the guy with the arrow in the eye is someone different altogether.
There has also been an argument made that the arrow has been added later and is therefore more symbolic. An arrow in the eye in medieval society might have been seen symbolic of the death of a sinner in much the same way as the biblical reference; “why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye”.
There is a lot of evidence that eye injuries are therefore emblematic of treachery and of sinners. There’s an example from the 12th Century where a lord, called Geoffrey de Mandeville. rebelled against King Stephen and ends up with an arrow in the eye. We don’t really know if that’s the case, but it is what should happen to him, even if it’s not necessarily what did happen to him.
Certainly, Harold didn’t have a great time at Hastings. He was killed there and the evidence is that he might be buried at Waltham Abbey. But there is a case that he might have wanted his body taken to Bosham and the family seat. To undertake the necessary DNA work should we find a possible burial site would be very hard to do with Harold, but maybe one day… It would certainly be interesting!
ScienceVega: What are your hopes for UK archaeology now that it is no longer offered at A-level?
DW: It obviously makes things more difficult and it lessens the profile of the subject. Archaeology wasn’t offered that widely when it when it was extant, but the route from A-level to degree is not nearly as clear. I think that is a great shame as it no longer gives students from an early stage the opportunity to see the diversity of it.
It is sometimes seen as a weakness, but I think archaeology’s ultimate strength is that you can be a specialist in so many different areas. You can be a hard scientist, you can do environmental work and you can be really cutting edge; ancient DNA isotope work and things like that. Or you can be much more at the humanities end of things, using a combination of sources, such as excavations and surveys and everything in between. Archaeology is genuinely a subject that draws from so many areas, and is so multifaceted, and that’s what’s so attractive about it. It is a shame that students aren’t getting the chance to explore that before they make their choices at degree stage, especially as archaeology seems more popular with the public than ever.
The link to the original paper can be found here.
